Aston Martin team principal Mike Krack hopes that the Silverstone outfit doesn’t get into a routine of experimenting with different AMR24 floors on race weekends in search of a track specific benefit.
Traditionally teams bring floor upgrades that stay on the car for all types of venues.
However this year several have been swapping back and forth after finding that their latest updates don’t necessarily work as planned.
Krack is wary of getting into a situation of flying multiple versions of the floor around the world in search of what works best at a given track.
While floors are obviously very light their large size and the volume of the flight cases in which they are transported means that they are hugely expensive to freight, with a direct impact on the cost cap.
“They are different,” said Krack when asked by formu1a.uno about the team’s experimentation in Baku.
“Some are better in this area, some are better in that area. And that is what we chose to do that, we tried it.
“And you can even call it circuit specific by now, which is scary, because you have to carry floors around the world, which is not a cheap way to transport.”
Asked if a circuit specific floor choice could become a regular feature he said: “Well, I hope not. You have here a track with this heavy low-speed bias, and then you have tracks where you have basically all speeds, and then you have tracks where there is more high-speed bias.
“And with the way the aerodynamics have evolved, they are so on the limit that for us, and maybe also for some other teams, you always have to consider what is the best for you now. I don’t think that the race winner is doing that at the moment.”
Krack says that there are more updates to come for the AMR24.
“We are were still working on bringing parts going forward,” he said. “These are parts that have been developed already, and we try to bring them when they are finished, as quickly as possible.
“We bring them as quick as we can. If something is finished earlier, we bring it to Singapore, and if not, we bring it later, as they come.”
The team was given a boost by Fernando Alonso’s sixth place in Baku, the Spaniard gaining from the late Sainz/Perez crash after working his way into eighth.
“It was the maximum,” said Krack. “We saw from these fights that were going on you had to be on your toes, and you had to be there, because something could happen anytime.
“Even at the very front with Piastri and Leclerc, with the fights that were going on, we said we need to be we need to have this position, because if something happens, we can capitalise on it. And we managed to.
“To be honest we were quite concerned for the tyres going into the race. Fernando managed them really well, and he still had some juice in them when it mattered at the end, when Albon came with fresh mediums, I was surprised how easy was to hold him off.”
Krack acknowledged that Alonso’s drive would probably go under the radar: “It’s super unfair to be honest, because it will go down like a P6. But if you see yesterday, if you see today, I don’t think that the car was really in that position. So we maximised obviously the good starting position.
“But then you have also to bring it home, because you have quick cars all around you trying. One is undercutting, the other one is staying out. What do you do? And this was really well managed, I think, from the pitwall as well.
“You know what you do in that situation. But then also we attacked. We are hard on tyres, so to bring it home was a fantastic achievement.”
Alonso also benefited from a lower downforce setup than his team mate Lance Stroll.
“It was a choice,” said Krack.
“Basically coming here we saw here that you need to have proper speed. We were surprised about the low grip. So I think what happened to us, is what happened to everybody, you had to go up on load because the grip of the track was too low.
“The cars were different. We had a little bit more load on Lance’s car, but he was still having speed. Fernando said in the debrief that he was not feeling vulnerable on the straight at any time. So that was good.”
